the family lived in a long terrace, and she knew all the neighbours’ little secrets; for all kinds of strange reports used to travel from house to house, over the garden walls, or else from door to door, when the maids were cleaning the steps of a morning. And she advised me, if ever I took a house in a terrace a little way out of town, to be very careful that it was the centre one--at least, if I had any regard for my reputation. For I must be well aware that a story never lost by telling; and consequently, if I lived in the middle of a row of houses, it was very clear that the tales which might be circulated against me would only have half the distance to travel on either side of me, and therefore could only be half as bad, by the time they got down to the bottom of the terrace, as the tales that might be circulated against the wretched individuals who had the misfortune to live at the two ends of it; so that I should be certain to have twice as good a character in the neighbourhood as they had. For instance, she informed me of a lamentable case that actually occurred while she was there. The servant at No. 1 told the servant at No. 2 that her master expected his old friends the Baileys to pay him a visit shortly; and No. 2 told No. 3 that No. 1 expected to have the Baileys in the house every day; and No. 3 told No. 4 that it was all up with No. 1, for they couldn’t keep the bailiffs out; whereupon 4 told 5 that the officers were after No. 1, and that it was as much as he could do to prevent himself being taken in execution, and that it was nearly killing his poor, dear wife; and so it went on, increasing and increasing, until it got to No. 32, who confidently assured the last house, No. 33, that the Bow-street officers had taken up the gentleman who lived at No. 1, for killing his poor dear wife with arsenic, and that it was confidently hoped and expected that he would be executed at Horsemonger-lane jail, as the facts of the case were very clear against him. All which, Mrs. Toosypegs said, proved, very clearly, that servants were a “bad lot,” and that there was no trusting ’em with anything, but what they must go wasting their time gossiping and putting it about all over the neighbourhood. Though, for her own part, she always made it a rule to shut her ears against all scandal.